Creating high quality videos of video game-play is a lot more complicated than simply recording and uploading your videos to YouTube. If you want to do it right and make it look good, you need to know a few things about video editing and video file formats. I’ll take you through the process that I use (MAC, not PC), for my video game-play footage and try to answer most of the questions I receive.

First, if you’ve watched my video titled Hauppauge HD PVR in Action you’ll find everything you need to know to hook the unit up properly. With the unit hooked up correctly and your video game running, plug the USB cable from the HD PVR to your computer or laptop and open EyeTV (or HDPVRCapture). If you are using Windows, you will use the Total Media Extreme software that came with the HD PVR. Click the red record button on the EyeTv User Interface to begin recording. Note that if you are not a partner with YouTube, you have a 10 minute 59 second upload limit on your video length, so you need to keep this in mind as you record, so that you record in 10 minute blocks or are prepared to edit and splice out the footage that you want to upload. Once you are finished recording, click the red button again. After you’ve recorded several clips, you’ll see them listed in the EyeTv User Interface. Highlight all of the videos you want to use, right click, choose Export and select a folder for the video clips to be exported to. This will convert the videos from the proprietary hardware encoded file format to a MP4 file.

Now, we don’t want to edit compressed video, and the MP4 files we just exported are heavily compressed by the HD PVR, so we want to convert them to a file format more easily recognized and utilized by video editors. If you are using Windows, you’ll want to use the Arcsoft Media Converter to convert the video to an AVI file format, and if you are using a Mac, you’ll want to run MpegStreamClip (with Quicktime Pro installed) and convert your video to a HD Quicktime file format. You can watch this video to see how to go about doing this.

Once our videos are converted to a proper file format for editing, open up your video editor and begin editing. Note that if you plan to upload this video gameplay to YouTube, you’ll want to export your files from your video editor as an MP4 again. This will compress the video, slightly degrading its quality, but also significantly reducing the file size, making it much more manageable for upload. If you are using the Hauppauge HD PVR, it’s likely that you are recording in either 720p or 1080i, and as such, you need to export your file from your video editor with these file dimensions